STOP Buying Moving Equipment!

Hey, hey. What is up, Facebook? Listen, before I get started, if you want to increase profits, tighten up your operation, you need to know the seven key areas that your dispatcher needs to tighten up in your moving company. I put up a brand new free training. Just go to movingmastery.com. it's there. You can watch it instantly. Make sure you go check that out. But today I want to talk to you about buying moving equipment. Stop. Right? Stop buying moving equipment. It's such a big expense. In other words, you know, your trucks are costing you probably at least a thousand bucks to outfit correctly, right? With the pads, the dollies, the straps. Right? Tools, four wheelers, refrigerator, dollies, piano boards, everything that you need, right? Whether you're going tape, whether you using rubber bands, whatever, whatever you use. It's not cheap, right? So what happens is, if this is something that we're not keeping a close eye on, we could be losing a lot of money with the equipment, right? How many times have you received a call from a customer? Customer says, you know, your movers left the dolly here, your movers left some pads here, right? Probably happens often. And what you need to think about is how many times are they not calling you? How many times does that customer not reach out to say, you know, we've got your pad, we've got your dolly, we've got your, you know, your drill, right? Whatever it might be, you've got to keep a tight, tight inventory control over your equipment on your trucks. Recently, I'm with one of my private clients and we're going through his profit and loss statement. We're kind of like really drilling down on it, right? And we're looking at one of his locations and we're looking at moving equipment, and there's obviously something wrong there, right? So we see what's going on. So we drill into it and we look at all the invoices from the moving supply place that he buys equipment from in that particular city. And it's out of the norm, right? I mean, it's not what you need when you're not in a growth phase, right? Like buying moving equipment when you're growing. Great, right? Buy all you need, you get a new truck, you've got the ability to rent trucks. Go get the equipment. Make sure you keep that equipment, you know, even if you're doing it in a rental truck, when it comes off the rental truck, you've got it secured somewhere. I'm all for buying equipment when it's for growth, when it's for expansion, but not continuously buying Equipment, because your guys are losing the equipment, right? And it's an important, important piece of your profitability. Right? And I talk about this all the time because it's so important and so many people are so focused on their gross revenue. Right. How much can I make? I'm doing a million a year. I want to do 2 million a year. I want to do 3 million a year. That's great. But the profits have to go up with it. And a lot of times it's not even necessary to increase profits. It's not even necessary to make more gross revenue. There's a lot of money that could be made by tightening things up. By the way, go to movingmastery.com, get my brand new training on the seven key areas that your moving company's dispatcher needs to tighten up to increase profits there for you for free, for a limited time. Make sure you go check that out. But today we're talking about stop, stop, stop buying, moving equipment constantly, over and over, when it's not because of growth. All right? It's something that, you know, seems like it's a hard, hard thing to tackle. And I'm going to give you a tip on how to do it and how to handle it here in a second. But it's important to first understand how damaging it is, right? How much that's costing your business. And I know it sounds so simple, but when you look at your long term goals, when you look at your long term objectives, when you look at, you know, your targets for what you want to hit in profitability and what you want to be able to take home on a yearly basis as the owner of the company, when you look at all these expansion plans that you have and the fact that, you know, you either have the cash flow to be able to fund it, or you don't have the cash flow to be able to fund it, people want to start looking for magic bullets. They want to start saying, louis, what's the one thing I can do to ensure that my profits are high? What's the one thing I can do to ensure I'm making the money that I need to make? And the answer is really, you need to run a tight ship. And that's not just one thing, right? There's many little things that need to get done. And making sure that your inventory control is on point is huge. All right, so when we talk about inventory control, you know what happens, right? In the morning, you send your crews out. Let's just say we're talking about local moves, you know, Similar with long distance, but it's not on a daily basis. But you send your crews out, right? They go out, they take a truck, you assign them to the truck for the day. Maybe, you know, maybe that's their truck on an ongoing basis, right? You've assigned it to them. Or maybe it's a new driver in their truck each day. Doesn't matter. They need a certain level of equipment on that truck in order to be able to fulfill that move successfully, right? And the worst thing you could do, I hear people say it, they're like, you know what? I'm not buying anything else. They lose everything I buy. They could go do the move with the pads I give them. They could go do the move with the dollies I give them. They've lost stuff. I'm not buying them anything else. That's pretty screwed up. I mean, that's your company. Those are your customers. So I'm not saying this is you, but I hear this from people, right? And they want to penalize their movers. But who are they really penalizing? They're penalizing their customers. And when they're penalizing their customers, they're penalizing their own business. All because they don't have a system to keep the inventory under control. All because they don't make an effort to go and say, you know what, on a daily basis, we need to make sure we're not losing equipment. All right? It's all about running a tight, tight operation. So let's talk about some of the ways you could do this. I mean, the simplest, easiest way is to do a daily truck inventory, right? So you've got everything that you know should be on a truck. And you want to have your trucks nice, like, very abundantly equipped, right? You want to have enough pads, you want to have enough dollies, depending on the size of your truck, right? Maybe you need 60 pads. Maybe you need two, three, two wheel dollies, two four wheel dollies, a refrigerator dolly. You need piano boards, you need five, six straps. If you got the E tracks, you've got your tools, you've got your broom, you've got your rubber bands. If you're using rubber bands, tape, shrink wrap, whatever it might be, make sure you've got plenty on there. Because anytime you don't have enough pads for your movers, what's going to happen? They're gonna skimp on pads, which is gonna cause damage, all right? And the only reason that anyone would skimp on pads is because they're short on pads. And the only reason they're short on pads is because they're losing pads. All right, so the simplest way to resolve this is to do a daily truck inventory. Right. And a daily truck inventory doesn't have to be difficult. You don't have to have a full time person doing this. Let me tell you how we did it. This was from very early on, all the way till I had six locations. You know, 12,000 moves a year. This is how we were doing it. And it's pretty simple, right? So we would send the crew out in the morning, they'd come in, right? So dispatch would open up, let's say 6:30, the doors open, movers come in, first thing they do is they grab an inventory sheet. Okay. Blank sheet of paper. I don't have one here, but I have a sheet of paper. So let's just say they grab a blank sheet of paper. That's truck inventory. Right. So it has everything listed on there that would be on the truck. Pads, dollies, boxes as well. Right. All the different boxes. Because you need to make sure you've got boxes on the truck. So you could sell packing material and sell packing services on the job. If you don't have the packing, if you don't have the boxes, you can't sell it. And a lot of companies won't leave it on the truck because it goes missing. That's not the answer. The answer is to tighten up inventory control. So you send them out. Okay, so let's say the driver comes in and maybe this driver, he's been in this same truck for a few days. Okay, let's just say scenario. And he comes in, he's going to grab the sheet, going to go out to the truck, he's going to do his inventory. But he doesn't want to count everything because he knows that you know it's the same, or at least he feels it's the same. Or at least he wants you to think that it's the same because he knows there's consequences if he lost equipment. So he just knows what yesterday's was. And he goes up 60 pads, 62 wheelers, four wheelers. Right. He starts filling it out, brings it back in. Okay, let's. Whether it's right or not. Right, no problem. Right. Let's just, let's move on from there. So now they come into the dispatcher who's there handing out keys to trucks, handing out jobs, and they say, here's my inventory. Okay. Which they need to turn in before they actually get the contract, before they get the move. Even if you're using a CRM and a tablet to be able to do your bill of lading. And they need to turn in their inventory first. Okay, so what the dispatcher will do is have all of yesterday's inventory sheets. Again, these are just blank pieces of paper. I didn't have the inventory sheet here in like, you know, we kept them and you know those, they're like three things to hold paper in. I don't know what they're called. You just kind of put them there. Anyways, they were on the desk and he had them there and he would take it out and look at. Okay, this is truck 602. This is truck 602 and compare the two, right? Let me look at this one and let me look at this one. And if it's all the same, no problem, go ahead, have a great day, go take care of our customers. Right? You might say, Louis, but what if he's lying and he's not putting the right information? Right, that's possible. But here's when you catch that, you catch that when you switch the driver in the truck, alright? So now let's say it's a few days later that driver's not there and you're gonna put somebody else in the truck. Well, now they go out and they do the same thing, alright? They take an inventory of the truck, they come back, alright? And now they know they're responsible for all the equipment in that truck. So now they're gonna really do a good count of what's in that truck. They're gonna go in and out they come in. Dispatcher, same thing, takes the two, he's comparing them. And if there's something missing, here's the key. If there's something missing, remember there needs to be consequences for this missing equipment, right? So if there's something missing, let's just say this says 52 pads and this one says 60 pads, right? So now there's eight pads missing. Well, you know, in order to penalize the driver that was in the truck previously, you know, it would be unfair to just take the word of the new driver, right, Saying that there's only 52 pads. So at that point what we would do is send the dispatcher out. Or a lot of times if there was two dispatchers, depending on the location and size of the location. But you know, in one of the smaller locations there'd be one dispatcher and he would go out and say, you know, or get help from the warehouse manager or the warehouseman would go out and do it for him, but go out and then do a count on the truck. Meaning, alright, there's obviously there's eight pads missing. Alright, I need to penalize the person who lost the eight pads, which is the driver that was previously in this truck. In order to do that, I need to feel confident that I went out and witnessed it myself and I did a count myself and saw that there was eight pads missing. So instead of going out and doing an inventory every single day, right. A lot of people say, Lewis, you know, I want to start doing an inventory, but I can't go out there every day and count what's on the truck. You don't need to, okay, let your driver go out and do it, verify it, reference it with the day before, see if it's the same. If it's not the same, then go out and count it yourself just to make sure. And depending on where you are, depending on the state you live, depending on the labor laws, if you could charge them for the missing equipment. Charge them for the missing equipment. Some places you can't do that. Alright. But you've got to get on top of this. We're coming into season, we're coming into summer and if you've just got missing equipment, I mean, do you really want to go, you know, take the time to book moves, take the time to service moves, just to watch all your profits, you know, get left at a customer's house or worse, have a mover who's essentially kind of, you know, I had it happen to me, right? We found a long distance driver that was stashing equipment in a self storage unit over time saying I need more equipment, I need more equipment, ordering more and more equipment, stashing the other stuff so that he can go out and start his own company one day. So the point is, if you're on top of it, it doesn't happen and it doesn't have to be that hard. Start every day with this minimal, minimal exercise to make sure that you're on top of your inventory and you'll stop losing that equipment. Listen, if you want to learn the seven key areas, this is just a fraction of one of those areas on how to increase profits and tighten up operations in your moving company. Go to movingmastery.com there's nothing to buy, it's free. I put it up there for you. But it's like an hour plus long video where you can go in and get this training. You need to do it right now, before season. Share it with your dispatcher, share with your team, make sure you guys are geared up and ready to make some money this season, right? You can't just go out there and work hard. You've got to have the results. You've got to be able to get the money to come home with you. You've got to have the happy customers to give you those five star reviews. All right, let me see who's here. Katz. What's up, cats? Massimo, I started doing the inventory after following your advice. All right, cool, man. Tell me what. How did it go? Let me know how that went. I'd like to hear about it. And yeah, anybody else, if you guys are doing inventory, let me know if you've done inventory based on any information I've shared. Or maybe you've been to, you know, one of the moving sales academy seminars where we go deep into that. Or you're in my monthly program where we talk about it as well. Let me know how that's helping you. If you have any real numbers, I'd love to hear it. I know from my private clients that, you know, the numbers are staggering when you go from not paying attention. And that's by the way, when I say that it's not a shot at anybody, right? As a business owner, as a moving company owner especially, it is tough to keep track of everything you've got going on, right? There was always times, I mean, I had times where it was like you knew you were supposed to be doing something, but there was just so much other stuff going on. It's a matter of prioritizing it. And I believe this is a priority because, you know, again, profitability, if it's going out the window in the way of pads and dollies and all this and that being left at customers houses, it's a problem. So listen, season's here. All right? I hope this was helpful. Let's see. Tara. Hey, Tara. What's up, Tara? We see. Let me get this here. See more. We require our guys to complete a truck equipment check daily. It definitely helps. We've seen improvement with our equipment once we started this. And holding the movers accountable. Nice, Tara. Nice. Yeah, guys, this works. Don't hesitate, don't wait. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to. I like to keep things very, very simp. Create yourself an inventory sheet, have the movers check it each day. Go out there, if there's a discrepancy, count the stuff, hold them accountable, and that's it. Keep that money for yourself. The only time you should be buying woven equipment is when you're buying new trucks or you're renting new trucks because you have the opportunity to do more jobs. Guys, go out there every single day. Profit in your business, thrive in your life. Make sure you go to movingmastery.com check out that free training while it's still up. I'll see you later.